Tumultus

by D. W. Ulsterman

  Looking over Bear’s work, Yakov simply nodded. The train was now travelling at nearly forty miles an hour. No more seekers could be seen in front of them.

  Mac, Reese, Dublin, and Cooper looked back at the dark forms that were falling from view behind the passenger car. Mac was attempting to estimate how many of the things were left alive, knowing the seekers would continue to stalk them all the way to Manitoba if able to do so.

  “I’m guessing about a hundred and fifty of those things are left, at least from the ones we saw today. We blew through at least two-thirds of our ammo dealing with them. Another attack like that…we just don’t have the firepower to handle it.”

  Cooper was already reloading his two Colt revolvers as Mac spoke.

  “I’m down to eighteen rounds. Guess that means I better make them count, huh?”

  Reese and Dublin were inventorying the other weapons and ammo that still remained - ten shotgun shells and just enough rounds to refill one assault rifle magazine. Mac, Reese, and Dublin’s handguns were already empty, and no more ammunition for those, or any of the other weapons was left.

  Mac covered his mouth as he shook with another series of violent coughs. Dublin stepped toward him but he shook his head several times and waved her away.

  “I’m fine. More worried about our chances of being able to defend ourselves. If we run into any more trouble…”

  Mac’s words remained hanging between the others as all of them turned to look through the windowed door at the back of the passenger car. The light outside was already diminishing. Soon, it would be dark.

  Cooper noted the train was traveling southeast, as more trees began to dot the landscape outside. Their speed continued to increase.

  “We’re definitely making good time. Figure we must be traveling at almost fifty miles an hour now. Those things back there are fast, but not this fast.”

  Mac eased himself back into his window seat, trying to hide yet another shot of pain that coursed through his lower back as he did so. Despite this pain, as soon as he was seated, he could feel sleep already working to overtake him. Mere minutes later, and his head dropped to his chest and the sound of his increasingly labored breathing mixed with that of the train wheels moving over the tracks below the passenger car. Brando walked over to where Mac sat, paused to briefly sniff the older man’s sleeping form, and then lay down next to him, the dog’s head setting down gently atop Mac’s feet.

  Cooper carefully watched the attention Brando was giving to Mac, before turning to Reese and Dublin and whispering to them.

  “Whatever it is Mac is suffering from, it’s got him in a real bad way. What you saw Brando do right there, reminds me of this old cat that would show up at the ranch every few weeks. Tough thing, big white and black long haired Tom, always looking like it had just gotten into a scrape with another cat, raccoon, whatever – ears all torn up. It would hang out around the porch for a day or two, eat a few scraps of food I’d give it, before setting out to wherever it would go. Well, it had that routine for a few years. Brando didn’t pay it much attention. Guess he sensed I had kind of adopted it as a part time resident or something.

  “Last summer though, the cat just kept hanging around the porch. He would lay there curled up for hours at a time. I finally picked it up to look it over and noticed how much weight it had lost. No sign of trauma, but it just didn’t want to eat. Then it didn’t want to drink. With cats like that, it can be feline leukemia, basic renal failure, any number of things. The end result though, is the cat don’t get better, right? They just...die. Well, after I set it down, Brando walks up and sniffs at it, then lays right down next to it with the end his nose nudged up against the cat’s body. I go back and get Brando to leave the cat alone, have him follow me out to the barn, and then kind of forget all about it.

  “Later in the day, I’m heading into the house for some lunch and there’s Brando lying down next to that cat on the porch again. So I go over and tell him to get into the house. He’s a good dog, he listens, and that’s what he does, but inside the house, I can tell he’s agitated. He’s not barking or anything, just a nervous tension. When you’re around an animal for a while, you can sense when something’s bothering them, and I could tell, Brando was bothered by having to be inside the house. Normally, that’s not the case. Wherever I’m at, he wants to be. Not that day though. So I let him back outside and he goes right over to the cat, sniffs at it again, and then lays right down next to it. By the time its dark I go out to see if Brando wants back inside. Nope. He stays next to the cat, who by then, I could tell was having a lot of trouble breathing.

  Next morning, Brando is at the door wanting in and the cat is curled up where I saw it the last time, but it’s dead. And at that point, Brando didn’t seem to even notice it there. He came in the house and waited for me to give him breakfast like he didn’t have a care in the world.”

  Cooper Wyse paused for a moment, his eyes looking over at Mac sleeping as Brando lay down at his feet.

  “Thing is, I figure Brando had some need in him to be there for that cat in the last moments of its life. The cat didn’t have anybody else. It was old, had lived a long, hard life full of all kinds of cat-related adventure, and now that life was coming to an end. Brando could smell the death on it, knew the cat didn’t have long to live, and for whatever reason, he just wanted to be there for it when it happened. That might sound crazy, like I’m giving a dog way too much credit, but I’m telling you, that is what Brando was doing. He was helping that cat, in some unspoken way that animals have, he was helping that old cat come to terms with dying. He was comforting it.”

  Dublin looked at Cooper and then back to Mac, trying hard to stop her eyes from tearing up.

  “And that’s what you think Brando senses with Mac? That he’s dying? He’s trying to…to comfort him?”

  Cooper slowly nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what Brando’s doing. I noticed it the first day Mac arrived at the ranch, how Brando seemed to be watching over him.”

  Reese put his arm around Dublin and drew her close, sensing her growing sadness and how hard she was fighting not to break down completely.

  “So what do we do? We can’t turn back.”

  Cooper gave Reese a slight smile.

  “No, we can’t turn back. Frankly, I wouldn’t even consider it. You two know Mac about as well as anybody. He strikes me as the kind of fella who wants to be contributing something right to the very end, right?”

  Dublin nodded as she put a hand over her mouth to muffle a sob.

  “So I figure we keep letting the old dog have his days, however many he’s got left. That’s what would make him happiest. And when the time comes, and I’m pretty sure it’s coming sooner than later, we learn from Brando’s example. We make sure we’re there for Mac at the end. That’s not such a bad thing after all, to be leaving this world with others you care about watching over you, comforting you, reminding you that you’re loved. A lot worse ways to go out than that. A lot worse…”

  XXXVII.

  “That Libya situation was a real shit-hole Mac. We never should have taken that assignment. That place was never right from the moment we arrived. We give CIA the coordinates on Gaddafi and an hour later they are lighting up his caravan? It was supposed to be a locate and capture. Not an assassination. Did you see how many of ours were in that crowd? The ones who shot Gadaffi? That thing was staged. That was a team who caught him. One of ours who killed him.”

  Mac looked back at Benny with confusion. What the hell was he doing here? And why was he talking about Libya? That was almost thirty years ago. Actually, Benny was dead. All of them were dead. Except for Mac.

  “Benny – you’re dead. This must be a dream, because you died years ago. After I went to prison. Before Dominatus. Way before now.”

  The tall black man who had been an integral part of Mac’s off the books military team shook his head and laughed at Mac’s remark.

  “Good old Mac, some thi
ngs never change. Always trying to stay in the here and now. I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m living in the then and when. Catch my drift?”

  Mac looked away from Benny and realized he was in fact standing in their former safe house just outside Benghazi proper. An upscale, off white, two story building that had a much larger lower level basement from which they had been working from for nearly three weeks – three weeks marked by increasing tribal violence throughout the northern half of Libya and pleas from those left in the Gadaffi regime that they were willing to turn themselves over to the United Nations authorities.

  Wait – the events in Benghazi really happened, but I never had this particular conversation with Benny. This can’t be real.

  Somehow Benny heard Mac’s own thoughts, causing him to break out in laughter again. Benny always seemed to be in a good mood, even during some seriously dangerous situations. It made the fact the report of his suicide upon his return to the States that much more unbelievable. They had killed Benny as sure as they killed the others and imprisoned Mac.

  We simply knew too much and what we knew made us not worth the risk. We had outgrown our usefulness to them.

  “You got that right, we knew too damn much. As for this conversation, you’re right, Mac. We never had it back then in Benghazi. We had others. I bet you remember Jack warning us how bad things were getting. The NSA surveillance of everyone from Senators to the little old lady next door. The odd behavior in the White House. All the cover ups, the lies, how afraid everyone was getting. Couldn’t trust nobody no more. Not CIA. Not military. We were fucked from the get go when we took that job. Day one, man. Day one.”

  “Why are you here, Benny? This is some dream, right?”

  Benny walked up to Mac and hugged him. Hugged him tight. Mac was surprised how real it felt. Surprised too how he found himself hugging Benny back.

  “This is as real as it needs to be, Mac. Call it a dream, call it a vision, call it the here and now. It’s all those things and anything else you need it to be.”

  Benny looked just as he did the last time Mac had seen him alive. Tall, strong, a round kind face with deep set dark eyes, his slightly receding closely shaved hairline sitting atop his brown, smooth forehead. Like Mac, Benjamin Williams had spent years honing his skills in the American military, and then later, as a hired gun for the U.S. government – actions people like them simply called “off the books” operations.

  “So did you kill yourself Benny? Like they said?”

  Benny’s face flashed anger – a rare occurrence.

  “Hell no, Mac. You know me better than that. They were in my house when I got home. A little needle in the back of my neck and I was immobilized. Still conscious, but couldn’t move.”

  “They got you with a paralytic.”

  Benny nodded back to Mac.

  “That’s right. We used that stuff a little ourselves didn’t we? In fact, the whole thing went down just like we would have done it. They sat me down in my own chair, in my own kitchen, already had a suicide note ready to go that looked like my own handwriting. Placed the gun in my hand, put it to my head, and pulled the trigger. Murder by suicide.”

  Mac looked back at Benny, noting how calm the man was even when describing how he had been killed.

  “How’d they get past the toxicology? Avoid traces of the paralytic coming up in the report?”

  Benny put a finger to the side of his forehead and tapped it lightly.

  “Think, Mac. What did they have us do right before we were sent off to Libya?”

  A light went on in Mac’s head.

  “The physicals. They drew blood. Everything.”

  Benny was nodding.

  “That’s right – they already had the report ready. Had a kill option for each of us if we learned too much. We always thought we were so smart. Thing is, we underestimated just how evil the people whose checks we were cashing really were. How easily they were ready to kill off their own. So they manufactured an entire autopsy report, had one of their own sign off on it, had me cremated, and that was that. The investigation was opened and quickly closed. I killed myself. That’s what they said, what the report said, and nobody with any kind of authority even thought to question it. I know you did…but by then, you were already in as much danger as I was.”

  Mac had carried a deep guilt over the loss of his team, always wondering if he could have found a way to protect them.

  “I couldn’t protect you, Benny. You, Jack, Minnick, I should have done something. It was my job – protecting you.”

  Benny smiled back at Mac.

  “You always thought you could save everyone, didn’t you? None of us went into that world blind. We all made a choice. We were paid and paid well, knew the risks. Don’t bother with guilt…or regret. Life’s too short, Mac. You’ve done well for yourself since then. More importantly – you’ve done well for a lot of other people. All those years you helped protect them in Dominatus. All those lives you saved. And you’re doing it again, Mac. One last time. Finish this mission. You’re close. So close.”

  Mac looked down at the desert sands outside the Benghazi safe house, doubt creeping into his mind once again.

  “I’m too old, Benny. Too sick. Too tired. You know, I’ve never really been right since Benghazi. The whole thing changed for me back then. Our own government running those weapons – the dirty bombs. How they killed off that ambassador. I still can’t believe we had fallen so far. That the people put in power individuals so willing to sacrifice so many, just to consolidate their own power. That’s the part I just can’t understand. The goddamn motivation to do such a thing.”

  Benjamin Williams placed a hand on each of Mac’s shoulders and gently squeezed them.

  “You can’t understand evil, Mac. No matter how you might try, evil is just too incomprehensible. People like us, we thought we were fighting for the good guys. Hell, we thought we were the good guys. And when that all gets turned upside down, it doesn’t make much sense. I get that. You are one of the good guys though, Mac. And this thing you’re doing right now…this trip to the priest in Churchill, it can change the world. Do you realize that, Mac? The weapon is real. It exists and it’s there waiting for someone to put it into action. You can take back some of what was lost here in Benghazi all those years ago.”

  Mac stepped away from Benny and looked up into the bright blue Libyan sky above him.

  “You’re just my own mind talking to me, Benny. You’re not here. This isn’t real. Maybe the priest is real, the weapon. I’m willing to try and find out, but you’re just my own guilt talking back to me. You’re gone, dead. A long time ago…”

  Mac looked down to find Benny gone. He stood alone outside the Benghazi safe house. Half hidden in the sand next to his feet was a scrap of weathered paper that moved slightly as a warm breeze blew across the open desert.

  This isn’t real. None of this is real. Benny is dead. They’re all…dead. And soon I’ll be dead too and that will be that. No God. No afterlife. Just…nothing.

  Mac’s mind continued to replay that thought as he leaned over to pick up the scrap of paper. Its surface was slightly rough, weathered, and on it he found a brief, handwritten message:

  The beginning of the new beginning

  Mac instantly recognized the words. They were the very words inscribed on the grave of the Old Man just outside his cabin in Dominatus. The words Alexander David Meyer had used to describe the events of the attack on Dominatus, when he believed that attack and their successful defense of Dominatus would initiate a second revolution throughout the United States. The Old Man had been right, to a degree. Many did rise up against the New United Nations, though not so many to ensure a clear victory, a victory that now appeared as uncertain as ever.

  Peering more closely at the message, Mac found himself smiling at what he saw.

  Not only were the words written down those of the Old Man, so too was the handwriting…

  XXXVIII.

  The Great
Consulate had to stop. He could feel his heart pounding inside of his chest as he leaned against the cool wall of his residence. Below his feet lay the body of the adviser – the body he had spent the last twenty minutes slowly pulling across the floor toward the entrance to his killing room where a very hungry seeker awaited.